War and Famine in Late Colonial Bengal

This was a raw read. A snippet: ]

A review of Hungry Bengal: War, Famine, Riots, and the End of Empire 1939-1946, by Janam Mukherjee.

Janam Mukherjee’s dissertation is a thorough study of late colonial Bengal in the context of war, famine, and riots leading up to the eventual dissolution of empire. The central argument of the dissertation is built on the claim that famine was the “most profound factor influencing the structural, political, social, economic and communal fabric of Bengal” during this period (p. 5). The author provides a vivid illustration of the famine’s “awesome magnitude” in terms of its impact on the socio-political landscape of Bengal (p. 7). Before proceeding to the core content of the work, the author makes three important revisions to our understandings of the famine: first, he complicates the chronology of the famine, which is otherwise more commonly referred to as the Bengal Famine of 1943. Secondly, he shows that the war efforts and business interests, both centered in Calcutta, were responsible in equal measure for the devastation that ravaged rural Bengal, thus leading to the famine. And by looking beyond the actual famine victims and drawing a more explicit link between rural and urban Bengal, this work also demonstrates that the Bengal Famine was indeed “man-made.” Finally, contrary to the claim that the famine victims “died without a murmur” (Sugata Bose,Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure, and Politics, 1919-1947. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) the author argues that by broadening the chronology of the famine the active resistance of the victims becomes evident.

I have spoken before about witnessing the raw hunger and pain in Calcutta when I was a teeny weeny chappie, around the war of independence in 1971. Seeing people fighting over scraps of food in the rubbish bins with dogs and others was a horrible sight. But to see that the British actually had direct responsibility over the death of millions of Bengali’s is a big big issue.

Sad.

Here is the wiki entryhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943 for the Bengal Famine.

Voices of sanity in wilderness

Kannu

Here's a heartfelt letter of thanks from a Muslim man who thanks Hindus for helping his discriminated community. 

You can see the discrimination all over the world. But you personally should fight this. Have a gf. Or friend. So what if she he is a Muslim. Are they good? That's all you need to know and you don't need no stinking book or political party to tell you so. This is why I hate the Bjp. It's primarily filled by bigots. Hardly any of them exhibit any intelligence and their followers are usually idiotic as well. And the funny thing is that for a Hindu party, most don't know Sanskrit or have ever read any Hindu books. So they have no frikking idea what Hinduism is either. 

But as I said you don't need to read a religious book be a good person. 

Love

Baba

Voices of sanity in wilderness | TwoCircles.net
http://twocircles.net/2013apr14/voices_sanity_wilderness.html

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Even as communalism grows in India, some of the fiercest voices raised in defence of Muslims happen to be those of Hindus

By Aijaz Zaka Syed,

Every time I despair of the land of the myriad hues and contradictions that is India, every time it’s many heroes give me fresh hope. And every time I stick out my neck to share the insecurities and concerns of my tribe and other dispossessed, I receive loads of fan mail most of which cannot be reproduced in these columns. Clearly, the Net is full of all sorts of fish. The comforting anonymity of cyberspace removes all inhibitions revealing our true colours.

But there are also those out there who never cease to amaze you with their generosity of spirit and ability to feel others’ pain. One such blessed soul is my friend Shashank Sharma, who heads a multinational IT giant. (I hope he will forgive this impudence to name him).

Robert Peston on his wife Siân Busby: 'I miss her all the time'

A paean to a loved one. Brave? Most definitely. Curious eh? To see and read these memories? Lucky that they had such a love to share and behold son. 

But one thing. Don't cry when I leave. One of my teachers told me that tears are an expression of regret. Regret that that person didn't get to do so many things. Play with them. Read with them. Dance with them. Cook with them. So on and so forth. We have had fun son. We have done so many things together. So nothing to cry about. But be happy for the times we spent together. That's the thing. Look around you at the people you love. Will you cry if they go? Why? Regret? If there's regret then why haven't you done those things with them? Do it now! 

Be happy son. 

Love

Baba

Robert Peston on his wife Siân Busby: 'I miss her all the time' | Radio Times
http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2013-05-05/robert-peston-on-his-wife-sin-busby-i-miss-her-all-the-time

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Siân Elizabeth Busby died on 4 September 2012 after a long illness. A few days later I transcribed her handwritten manuscript for the end of A Commonplace Killing, her final novel. My motive was selfish: I wanted to keep talking to her. I still do. The tears could not be staunched as I read, deciphered and typed. Foggy-brained, the transcription was spoilt by spelling mistakes and typographical errors. All mine. Siân’s prose was as pellucid and accurate as ever. And brave. Here she was, all hope lost of reprieve from the lethal cancer, reflecting on what it is like to know that death awaits on the morrow.

What caught me off guard is that the work is complete, and – for me at least – more-or-less perfect. Siân worked on it until the illness became excruciating and wholly incapacitating. I did not know, until reading handwriting as familiar as my own and hearing her voice in my head, that she had finished this exquisite work. I should have guessed. When Siân put her formidable mind to a project, whether it was teaching herself to read as an infant, years before going to school, or curating a museum on the history of Judaism (a non-Jew, she could hold her own in a scholarly spat with the rabbis, and inevitably knew far more about my inherited faith than me), or directing a 19-hour Chinese opera, she always triumphed. And as if to accentuate my own vanity, she was never smug, always dissatisfied with her own efforts, routinely critical of her achievements.

The Weeklies

he Weeklies
http://prospect.org/article/weeklies

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Poverty is hugely distressing son. It destroys your dignity, there is no love and you become the worst of the worst. Having lived though serious poverty which included your parents crying about money or rather the lack of it, it's not something that I would care to repeat. 

You never know what may happen so always have emergency cash and good savings. I keep on telling you, save a third of your salary son. Cut down on outgoings. It may mean a few less luxuries or entertainment but as you can see from me, having fun doesn't mean you need to spend money. 

See what happened to this family. Or families. Washed up in a hotel. But they will get out. That is what's creditable. They are fighting. And that's impressive Kannu. 

Love

Baba

From the outside, it is hard to know that people live in the Ramada Inn. The parking lot is always empty. The hotel sits facing a wide suburban boulevard called Kipling Street, just off Interstate 70 in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. The interchange where Kipling meets the freeway is packed mornings and evenings with daily commuters going to or coming from Denver and with skiers heading west into the Rockies. Hotels dot I-70 as it cuts through the 764-square-mile stretch of suburbia that runs from the city into the mountains, but at the intersection with Kipling is a cluster of seven budget-savers that travel websites warn tourists away from. The hotels advertise low prices—ranging from $36 to $89 a night—on neon signs next to gigantic flags that whip in the Front Range wind. Most offer even lower weekly or monthly rates. The Ramada is farther from the frontage road than the other hotels and is harder to notice, with its plain yellow stucco and dimly lit red sign. 

Inside the lobby, which has wide windows and a clear view of a long, low mountain called Table Top and the snowy peaks beyond, are plenty of clues that the Ramada is more than just a hotel. Off the lobby sit two sets of washers and dryers that each take a dollar in quarters, and on weekends families use one of the bellhop carts kept in a back hall to roll out baskets of dirty laundry. In the late afternoon, schoolchildren do their homework on the dozen tables where guests have breakfast. Residents sit at the two computers with Internet connections. They wander around in sock-clad feet and chat with whomever they run into.

At any given time, roughly 20 to 40 guests are staying long term. Since they pay by the week, they call themselves “weeklies.” To score the cheap rates, $210 for individuals and slightly more for families, they must pay in advance. Residents sign a form that lists the activities that could get them kicked out (mostly involving drugs) and warns that they won’t get reimbursed if they leave early, no exceptions. Some families stay only for a few weeks, some for months, giving the hotel the feeling of a dormitory. A rotating cast of front-desk clerks sells candy and rations towels and washcloths. Though some of the clerks are kind and helpful, the guests think of them as enforcers, and the clerks tend to treat the weeklies less as customers than as undergraduates stealing toilet paper and sneaking in hot plates.

Olivier Blanchard’s Five Lessons for Economists From the Financial Crisis

I take no pleasure in being prescient but one of the reasons we are ahead is because I lived thorough 3 recessions now. Son what goes up must come down. Details matter. Value investing is always going to win out. There are no silver bullets in investing returns. Find undervalued companies and invest. Look for good growth stories and good management. You read the intelligent investor. 

Still as an economics student this article is worth reading son. The plumbing matters. The connections, the pipe width, the material, the angles all matter in the financial and economic world. And you can never be 100% right. 

What people don't understand is that they don't understand what the future of the economy and financial system will be. So when people don't understand what's happening they react in bad ways. Go pray to god. Or bite people's heads off like the reaction against bankers. Or throw more laws. Like more laws against rape are supposed to lead to less rape. The thinking goes like this. 

We have a problem. So something must be done. This is something. Thus this must be done. 

Weird ass thinking son. 

Love

Baba

Olivier Blanchard’s Five Lessons for Economists From the Financial Crisis - Real Time Economics - WSJ
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/04/01/olivier-blanchards-five-lessons-for-economists-from-the-financial-crisis/

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What did the worst financial crisis and deepest recession in 75 years teach academic economists and policymakers on whose watch it happened? At a recent London School of Economics forum, convened to honor Bank of England Governor Mervyn King,Olivier Blanchard offered some answers.

Getty Images

Olivier Blanchard

Mr. Blanchard, 64 years old, is well positioned to offer such reconsideration. An internationally prominent macroeconomist, he spent 25 years on the MIT faculty before becoming chief economist at the International Monetary Fund in September 2008, just before the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

Here are Mr. Blanchard¹s five lessons in his own words, lightly edited by The Wall Street Journal’s David Wessel:

#1: Humility is in order.

The Great Moderation [the economically tranquil period from 1987 to 2007] convinced too many of us that the large-economy crisis -­ a financial crisis, a banking crisis ­- was a thing of the past. It wasn’t going to happen again, except maybe in emerging markets. History was marching on.

My generation, which was born after World War II, lived with the notion that the world was getting to be a better and better place. We knew how to do things better, not only in economics but in other fields as well. What we have learned is that¹s not true. History repeats itself. We should have known.

Why Still So Few Use Condoms

So many myths. So little facts. One interesting article son. I didn't realise the stats in the withdrawal method. Fascinating. I always believed that pre ejaculate had sperm. 

Lesson for you? Wear condoms for the first few times. It doesn't matter if you like it or not son, you have to be safe. Once you are comfortable, no issues, no diseases, etc etc, then you can go bareback. And plus your first objective is to ensure your partner enjoys and loves the act. Golden words son. If you make sure first and foremost that your partner enjoys, then you will enjoy more. 

Stay safe son. And have fun. 

Why Still So Few Use Condoms - David Masciotra - The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/04/why-still-so-few-use-condoms/275301/

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Continue to the TheAtlantic.com

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With the “next-generation condom” initiative, Bill Gates is acknowledging that the practical reasons people don’t use condoms warrant honest conversation.

David Masciotra Apr 29 2013, 9:02 AM ET

ryan.berry/Flickr

As the late author Norman Mailer put it, “The only thing you can depend on with condoms is that they will take 20 to 50 percent off your f***.” In a conversation with Madonna on the topic, Mailer also condemned condoms for making people part of “the social machinery” and destroying “most of the joy of entrance.” Madonna argued that condoms are “essential in the age of AIDS,” but conceded, “they feel terrible.”

If we’re honest, many of us do see condoms as robbing us of pleasure, stealing some excitement and spontaneity from intimacy, and dulling the intensity of sexuality. It’s okay to say that. These factors are the primary reasons that still only 60 percent of teenagers claim to use condoms. These factors warrant acknowledging. From there, condom usage declines as people grow older. The number one reason we have seen given time and again for refusal to wear condoms is the reduction of pleasure.

Anyone who dares criticize the condom is typically made the subject of demonization and condemnation.

It is politically incorrect to acknowledge the truth and simplicity of the condom’s inadequacy. Criticism of the condom opens one to righteous demonization and condemnation. Condom defenders often stifle honest and helpful discussion about sexuality, unplanned pregnancy, and sexually transmitted infections.

Shopping for Weed in the U.S

Kannu

Here's a funny description of how weed shopping happens in some parts of the USA. I'm a firm believer in drug legalisation. As a libertarian I cannot understand this tendency of governments to ban drugs. As long as I'm dealing in things out of my free will what's the problem? The drug war has been the most spectacular failure. It's like prostitution. Cannot be stopped. 

Yes. You may or may not try it. I actually didn't like it. First is the loss of control. Second is that it's just weird. And more importantly I'm naturally high and optimistic. :) I have fun, have faith in myself and in the future and am fairly happy most of the time. Other than when Diya and you call me fat. Then I'm grumpy. :)

Anyway. Here's the story. Remember the society we are building. Learn it's characteristics as you will have to navigate it son. 

Love

Baba

Shopping for Weed in the U.S. - GQ May 2013: Newsmakers: GQ
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201305/legalizing-marijuana-united-states-shopping-for-weed?printable=true

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Newsmakers

It happened. We legalized it! Pot is going to be the next great consumer product. Or so we all sort of believe. To commemorate, GQ’s critical shopper (marijuana division) travels to the most weed-friendly states in the union and offers GQ readers the first-ever authoritative guide to the lingo, the rules, the shops, and of course the many, many methods (lollipops! honey! wax! magical microwave popcorn! something called “dabs”?!) of getting high-legally! kind of!—in these United States

By Devin Friedman

Photographs by Maurcicio Alejo

April 2013

In November, they basically legalized marijuana. Even if you don’t pay attention to ballot initiatives or the like, you probably still possessed a fuzzy picture of where things stood. As of the past election cycle, marijuana is now totally street legal in Colorado and Washington. And possibly Oregon? And you’d been hearing for years about all those other places—there was a new state all the time—where you could buy it for medical purposes. Like California and Washington, D.C., and Connecticut and Rhode Island and, like, maybe New Mexico? Meanwhile, even in states where there is not yet a stipulation for those undergoing chemo to be able to blaze out, isn’t it functionally decriminalized? Isn’t it more or less okay to smoke weed right in front of a cop in New York City as long as you’re not killing someone with a tire iron while simultaneously being young and nonwhite? And conventional wisdom, at least from certain purviews, holds that the social taboo surrounding marijuana is now close to zero, whether you’re into older white women in Eileen fisher comfies (see: Steve Martin in It’s Complicated) or rap music (see: rap music).

How are your genes? Royal ones?

The Habsburgs were a fascinating dynasty. But this paper was giving a very interesting perspective on this family.

The European royal dynasties of the Early Modern Age provide a useful framework for human inbreeding research. In this article, consanguineous marriage, inbreeding depression and the purging of deleterious alleles within a consanguineous population are investigated in the Habsburgs, a royal dynasty with a long history of consanguinity over generations. Genealogical information from a number of historical sources was used to compute kinship and inbreeding coefficients for the Habsburgs. The marriages contracted by the Habsburgs from 1450 to 1750 presented an extremely high mean kinship (0.0628±0.009), which was the result of the matrimonial policy conducted by the dynasty to establish political alliances through marriage. A strong inbreeding depression for both infant and child survival was detected in the progeny of 71 Habsburg marriages in the period 1450–1800. The inbreeding load for child survival experienced a pronounced decrease from 3.98±0.87 in the period 1450–1600 to 0.93±0.62 in the period 1600–1800, but temporal changes in the inbreeding depression for infant survival were not detected. Such a reduction of inbreeding depression for child survival in a relatively small number of generations could be caused by elimination of deleterious alleles of a large effect according with predictions from purging models. The differential purging of the infant and child inbreeding loads suggest that the genetic basis of inbreeding depression was probably very different for infant and child survival in the Habsburg lineage. Our findings provide empirical support that human inbreeding depression for some fitness components might be purged by selection within consanguineous populations.

very interesting. Quite a lot of cultures around the world marry into the family, this consanguineous business is quite interesting. Witnessed this in Saudi Arabia, India and in many places in the UK as well.

Can Google Data Help Predict French Youth Unemployment?

Its an indication of how technology is changing our lives when Google data can help give some fascinating insights into unemployment. Here’s the paper.

According to the rising “Google econometrics” literature, Google queries may help predict economic activity. The aim of our paper is to test if these data can enhance predictions
for youth unemployment in France. As we have on the one hand weekly series on web search
queries and on the other hand monthly series on unemployment for the 15 to 24-year-olds, we use the unobserved components approach in order to exploit all  available information. Our model is estimated with a  modified version of the Kalman filter taking into account the twofold issues of non-stationarity and multiple frequencies in our data. We find that including Google data improves unemployment predictions relatively to a competing model without search data queries

Don't want to go too deep into the paper, you wouldn't be interested in my views of Kalman filtering, but the idea of “nowcasting” and “Google econometrics” is very interesting and new, no?

I tried Google econometrics out with a bank name. Here’s what the results show

Fascinating eh? Google searches rose steadily, peaked when the crisis was really hitting its peak and then slowly came down and has plateaued.

where are the searches coming from?

how curious. UK I can understand but from Mexico, India, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina, Indonesia?

It also allows you to view by city

here’s the listing by city in another graph

Poplar?? lol

some very interesting trends :)

NPR Code Switch | When Our Kids Own America

You listen to Eminem son. So thought you might find this interesting. I don't understand music. That entire art for me is a bit foreign but from a sociological and anthropological perspective it's a bit interesting :) 

Love

Baba

NPR Code Switch | When Our Kids Own America
http://apps.npr.org/codeswitch-changing-races/

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Oakland, Calif., is two time zones away from Brooklyn Park and a whole continent away from Harlem. It could either be a utopian vision of some multiculti urban future or its dystopian, post-industrial present. For a long time, Oakland was the cultural anchor on the West Coast for black Americans. If Harlem gave us the Cotton Club and the Harlem Renaissance, then Oakland gave us the Black Panthers (and thus the modern gun rights movement) and a groundbreaking resolution on Ebonics. Oakland’s black population, tiny before World War II, exploded largely due to an influx of workers at the city’s shipyards, and eventually composed nearly half the city.

But now white people make up the biggest group — Oakland’s 34 percent white, 28 percent black, 25 percent Latino, and 17 percent Asian. It’s one of the few cities in the country with significant populations of several major racial groups. It’s become a haven for young, skinny-jeaned, creative-class types — Forbes recently named the Uptown section one of the 10 best hipster neighborhoods in the country — all while the city has remained pretty violent. Although black people make up just over a quarter of the city’s population, they made up three-fourths of its homicides in 2012. Meanwhile, local television news crews are spending less time on the streets reporting on those crimes because their equipment keeps being stolen. It’s a city with neighborhoods on alternate timelines.

Coming Thursday, April 18: A story by Shereen Marisol Meraji about the demographic shift in Oakland, focusing on developments in the city’s Uptown neighborhood.

The aforementioned Uptown used to be a hub of black life in the city. But today …